In Jeopardy!

I generally don’t expect people to know that the author of Gargantua is Rabelais. If I were to eat out for lunch today and then go to the Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountain NP and then to the grocery store, I would guess that not one person out of the hundreds I see would know this information. I wouldn’t expect my neighbors to know it. I wouldn’t have expected any of my students to know it.

But I expect Jeopardy! contestants to know it. And yet in an episode a couple of weeks ago, one clue sought the author of Gargantua, and not one buzzer sounded. I’ll lower my expectations even lower: I don’t expect any Jeopardy! contestants to have read this comic masterpiece. But I expect them to be able to come up with, for instance, any author and title in my Britannica Great Books set. At Father Guido Sarducci’s university, “I say ‘economics,’ you say-a ‘supply and-a demand.’ ” Shouldn’t the traditional canon be in the heads of national-class quizzers and trivia enthusiasts at that level at least? I say ‘Gargantua’ and you say ‘Rabelais’?

It gets even worse. This past week brought the clue that went something like this: “So-and-so tried founding an ideal community based on this work by Plato.”

Crickets.

Honestly?! If you’re going to know about one ancient classic other than the Bible, isn’t it going to be Plato’s Republic? Okay, maybe the Odyssey, but you get my point. The next day, players were asked to identify the literary character who said something about Mr Darcy. Total silence again. Isn’t Pride and Prejudice our culture’s favorite nineteenth-century novel?

Jeopardy! contestants also don’t seem to know the Beatles or Carole King. But that’s a rant for a different blog.